PRESS: Russia’s data retention laws seen among world’s toughest moves

MOSCOW, Jan 12 (PRIME) -- Russia’s package of antiterrorist measures, put forward by deputy Irina Yarovaya and senator Viktor Ozerov, has found itself among the world’s top 10 initiatives to store data that could menace threaten further innovative progress, business daily Vedomosti reported Thursday citing the U.S.’ Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF).

Russia shares the list with China, Indonesia, Turkey, Vietnam and Germany, which have adopted much softer measures. Initiatives mostly concerned localization of data in a country, which, according to the ITIF’s experts, undermines the whole ecosystem of the world commerce and innovations.

Germany also decided to gather information on subscribers, like Russia, whose laws were still stricter. The European country will start collecting data on subscribers from July 1 with metadata to be kept for 10 weeks.

The controversial package of measures, adopted in Russia in 2016, obliges connection operators and Internet services to retain from July 1, 2018, phone talks, text messages, images, videos and other exchanged information of subscribers for six months. Telecom operators must keep metadata for three years, while Internet companies for one year.

Rules on metadata storage similar to German ones exist in Australia and the U.K., but their laws are milder than in the European country since they do not require localization of data. Companies should only provide information on request.

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